The Future of Adaptive Tutoring: Wrangling Complexity across Domains, Applications, and Platforms

Abstract

The purpose of this panel is to discuss current directions in research and design of adaptive tutoring, and the need for a method to uniformly describe tutors within this growing field. Discussions will focus on the increasing complexity of individual tutors, as well as how tutors could be categorized through identification of relevant, constituent parts. A standardized taxonomy would provide the foundation for establishing a quantifiable metric of complexity, which could then be used to compare vastly distinct tutors to one another. Applications of such a metric also include evaluating tutor effectiveness with respect to learning outcomes, comparing capabilities / usability of different adaptive tutor authoring tools, and providing more accurate estimates of the time required to develop an hour of tutoring. Individual elements of tutoring to be discussed within the context of this framework include team tutoring, psychomotor tutoring, multi-platform architectures, personalized tutoring, and authoring complexity.